Left4Dead: Shakeycam Bonanza

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I’ve a sneaking suspicion that these won’t stay up on GameTrailers, so take a look while they’re hot. Past the jump there’s a whole bunch of shakeycam videos of Left 4 Dead being played, and they show off some of the best stuff in the game. Left 4 Dead, in case you weren’t paying attention, is the 4-player co-op zombie shooter multiplayer type thing from Valve. I’ve played it, it’s entirely awesome, and it’s scheduled for release on November 4th.

This one shows someone being tongued to death by one of the boss infected, The Smoker. See how the co-op humans all yell to each other contextually – “Reloading!” – that’s automagic, and doesn’t require you to do anything.

This next video shows the player being vomited on by a boomer – another boss infected – something which brings the rabid zombies a-screamin’ and a-rendin’.

The third clip has some intense firefights going on, and a couple of boss infected attacks. Watch out for the smoker hanging one of the players by the neck right at the start. Players can be boss infected, but the AI performs the same kind of ambush tricks.

Like Max Payne, the Left 4 Deadites do like those tasty pills. (To ease the pain.)

Although one thing I haven’t seen is vids of people playing as the infected bosses. I really like Hidden: Source and I think it would be really similar to the hunter boss but I would still like to see it in action.

Minor point: when the zombies have you pinned down, it pulls back into third person view. First, this is probably the first time a 3rd-person cam has been used in a Valve game. :) More importantly though, I kinda wish they left it in first person. I imagine it would be scary as hell watching those zombies rip you apart in first person. I’m guessing it was a bit difficult to animate convincingly though. Still looks awesome though. :)

Friendly fire? Seriously? So in addition to the screaming zombies pouring through the walls, the creepy Boss Infected and the terrifying atmosphere i have to worry about accidentally decapitating a friend?

I really hope there is a “Sorry!” voice command. i think i’m going to need it..

Lol, the videos are hilarious for their lack of teamwork… When he’s using that minigun thing (turret?) in the first video he just ignored the fact the zombies have pinned down one of his teammates even though he turns to look at him several times, but just shoots every OTHER zombie that comes in sight… Or at the beginning with that big badass zombie going off to follow a player down the stairs and he just lets it go and goes to the other room instead (and gets pwned). Funny stuff, I hope we’ll see people play better, or we’ll just find our own little fun groups to play with like we did for Alien Swarm.

Game looks like, fun, single player would be alright to try out stuff and learn the maps, though perhaps also pointless since the coop is the point of this and the enemies and objectives will be randomly generated per round. Though locational awareness is probably going to help either way.

Second video- Zombie at the star just stands there as you shoot him right and proper.

Video the third- Zombies run straight past you to get team mates way way over there. Also endless bloody pessimistic griping from a woman.

I’m still not sold on the speed. In such tight environments with so many fast enemies I think the phrase is sonic clusterfuck. Anyone who played as a heavy on the night of the ten million pyros will understand how fun this is. There doesn’t seem to be much aiming or ammo conservation going on either. They’re just holding the trigger down and pointing at the huge swarm very slowly killing a guy.

Don’t get me wrong. This is Valve and I trust them enough to believe this game will be fun. But it won’t be the game I was hoping for from the first press releases. Also I really want them to clean up the zombies priority and path finding AI.

Don’t forget that the people playing in the videos are just random people at EA3. They don’t support each other because none of them know each other. They’re more interested in seeing the game than helping out some random guy they don’t know.

I’ll bet half the people playing didn’t even know what the game was about and just happened to be near when a station opened up and decided to try the game out.

It’ll be much more coordinated with a group of friends and much, much more fun once you get to play with people you know.

Al3xand3r, I thought that too at first, but looking at it again it looks to me like the gun just can’t be turned all the way around, so he has no choice but to shoot at the zombies dropping from the ceiling.

Well it’s probably modable to some extent so you could at least replace the zombies with aliens and make some appropriately dark and sci fi-ish levels to get in the right mood (though it’d be harder to have aliens that clibm walls etc, but that could be saved for the “boss” aliens).

Did anyone else yell at the guy to look left at the start of the first clip. How the hell does anyone who plays FPS’s not learn to check the damned corners, especially when the “corners” are unlit and make up the left half of the building.

Should be lots of fun.Jonathan:

Also endless bloody pessimistic griping from a woman.

I think that was because her health was in the red for most of the video. But yeah, it was a bit much.

I like the way the allies give context-sensitive information to one another, for instance when that idiot didn’t realize all the zombies behind him, the tattooed chap told him.
And as everyone noticed, girl was communicating a lot due to low health.
If L4D didn’t have the AI director and team communication, it would seem rather like a post-apocalyptic CS:S.

I hope the single-player is good, even if not as good as full multi-player, because I suspect nobody I know will buy this and I can see me getting bored of being berated by strangers for not treating it like an ACTUAL zombie holocaust and not letting any mistake from a teammate or myself ruin my evening.

What I really wanna see is somebody playing as a zombie, though I guess they’ll leave that ’til later.

Time to start picking out which of your TF2 friends you’re going to try teaming up with when this comes out.

I may be wrong but isn’t that the Witch making an appearance in the 2nd video? Right at the end there’s an eerie music cue and one of the players says ‘Lights out’. A few seconds later one of the player nearly cashes in her chips courtesy of a really fast (and solo) female infected.

Edit: Yes it is the witch, looking at my download again one of players yells ‘Witch’ as she barrels in.

Jonathan made a comment about infected running right past one player to attack one further away. I don’t think that’s a problem – that’s almost typical mob behaviour in many ways. Given that this mob is of humans who have lost their minds rational thinking is not going to be their top talent. An algorithm where each infected just picked the nearest player and attacked them would lead to really tedious gameplay. And sooner or later you’re going to be the poor bastard that every infected on the map picks as a target while your team mates are ignored. Then you’ll find out who your friends are.

Minor point: when the zombies have you pinned down, it pulls back into third person view. First, this is probably the first time a 3rd-person cam has been used in a Valve game.

TF2 taunts (and I forget, do you actually see yourself die in killcam? You’d think I’d remember, considering how often I die in it…) And you could perhaps include situations in Portal, although that’s more ‘third-and-first-person-at-once’.

This is looking a lot shmick-er than it did around trailer time; some dreadful voice-acting (“That definitely sounds like a [Boomer]!”), but hopefully that won’t be too big a deal.

@Captain Bland: I vaguely remember hearing that the friendly fire is moderated somewhat, ie, if your team mate is pinned down, you won’t be penalised for blasting away at the undead and accidentally clipping your mate.

I’m just wondering if I’ll be able to play this game, or if I’ll be too scared of the zombies :(

It looks really good fun, but I can’t help feeling that after a couple of play throughs it will soon loose its sparkle. Mindlessly hosing down endless waves of zombies with machine gun fire will soon get very repetitive, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough variety to give it any long term appeal.

Is this going to be a full price game or something more in the budget range like the HL2 Eps and Portal

>Mindlessly hosing down endless waves of zombies with machine gun
I’m not sure this ever gets old, though I prefer the classic pistol+shotgun combo myself. And CS is just 2 teams with similar sets of weapons trying to headshot each other but it seems to have kept its popularity. Maybe because we haven’t seen any opposing force vids people haven’t really registered that this is a two sider, if bored with shooting infected then become one and kick survivor ass. And as the two sides have different weapons and map access it will be a meaningful change.

But if the game does live up to its potential how easy will it be to get a game? Assuming 4 players can take the infected side each server is going to host 8 people, far fewer than most CS/TF2 and similar servers.

People will probably soon up the limits (and unbalance the game unless they also offer bigger maps and more enemies and lag, ha). Either way, Alien Swarm worked out fine with its 8 player max (though all 8 were on the same team) and it didn’t get tediously repetitive even though enemy placement and objectives were not randomised as they are in L4D. The player limit here is sufficient really, you’ll be more likely to find fun servers I think. How many times you think a TF2 or CSS server with good ping has too few players and so look for another one? L4D is probably playable enough with just 2 or 3 or 4 people (all in the human side) so you won’t have that problem (so long as you filter out empty servers).

@Don:
Yes I also thought that was the Witch in the 2nd video, one of the more enigmatic and apparently unplayable boss zombies. I remember reading about her before, that you weren’t supposed to fight her but to turn off your lights and sneak past or get wrecked. Seems that she can at least wreck one person, but judging by how quickly they took her down she doesn’t seem so tough as I imagined.

Yes, CS is just 2 teams with similar sets of weapons trying to headshot each other. But it’s two teams of human opponents. Unlike L4D which is humans vs. an AI who’s only tactic seems to be limited to just charging suicidal headlong at the players to beat the crap out of them.

Yes you can play as the infected but from what I’ve read, it’s just one or two players controlling some boss type characters and only at certain parts in the levels. I’ve yet to see any gameplay footage of some one playing from the infected point of view, and thus far that part of the game strikes me as being more of a bonus feature, rather than something that’s integral to the game.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to playing L4D, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that it will still be keeping people entertained after its initial few weeks of release. One for the modders to work on me thinks.